‘It’s a mess’: Effects of ongoing strike by Canadian diplomats widely felt and very costly

Canadian diplomats' strike widely felt and very costly

Like thousands who rely on Canada’s striking foreign service, Peter Guindon, a Canadian living in Beijing, is in a bind. His Chinese wife’s application for permanent residency is gathering dust in a Canadian visa office, so when his own Chinese visa expires shortly, their Canadian daughter could see her family split between two countries.

“It’s a mess,” he said.

From university students unable to start class in September, to foreign fruit pickers unable to help with the coming harvest, to tourists whose summer travels in Canada have been cancelled, the effects of the three-month-old job action by Canadian diplomats are broad, deep and costly, pegged at nearly $300-million in lost tourism alone.

It has already caused the cancellation of more than a dozen overseas trips by cabinet ministers. It disrupted the Governor-General’s African tour, free trade talks in Brussels and Tokyo and the Prime Minister’s G8 summit in Northern Ireland, according to the union, the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers.

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With both sides firmly entrenched, negotiations stalled, 1350 people on a rotating strike and picket lines set up everywhere from Paris to Manila, it seems likely to only get worse. Friday, staff walked out in Moscow, Delhi, Islamabad, Riyadh, Ankara and others.

“It really is having the impacts that job action is meant to have,” said PAFSO president Tim Edwards, who is also a senior advisor in the foreign service’s political stream, currently assigned to the Iranian nuclear program.

“One way or the other, the Canadian public is going to pay for this labour dispute not being settled,” said Richard Kurland, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver.

Long regarded as the sexiest branch of Canada’s civil service, the foreign service has always been spoiled for applicants, of whom only about 1% get jobs, in which they put diverse skills to use on the front lines of diplomacy and national security. The traditional diplomat, however, has been vulnerable to the increasing computerization of records and shifting government finances, such that at the 14-year mark, fully half have left the foreign service, Mr. Edwards said.

“The problem is that after about [a decade] of service, these foreign service professionals are looking in the office next door to them and seeing economists and lawyers and social scientists who are making huge amounts of money more than them, and they’re deciding to take their hard earned skills and experience elsewhere,” Mr. Edwards said. “None of us wants to be on strike. This goes against every bone in our body. It goes against our better instincts, it goes against our professional values, it goes against our dedication to our profession, it goes against our dedication to serving Canada and Canadians.”

Since the beginning of June, however, after an initial period of work-to-rule that remains in place, PAFSO has been directly targeting the government, and has vowed to scupper any overseas official business.

“Anytime a member of cabinet wants to travel abroad on government business, we are going to be pulling all of our members at Canada’s mission in the host country, we’re going to pull the geographic division at headquarters … and we’ll also pull any specialized divisions at headquarters that are working on specific deliverables. If there is a treaty or an agreement or something they want to sign, we’ll pull the people who are working on that as well. We’ve gotten well over a dozen cabinet level trips cancelled in the last six weeks,” he said. “All of this could be resolved for a tiny fraction of the wider economic fallout that the government’s inflexibility is creating.”

‘None of us wants to be on strike. This goes against every bone in our body. It goes against our better instincts, it goes against our professional values’

This strategy, in effect, is taking out a labour dispute on Canadians, the government says. “Our government has put forward an offer that is fair to employees and fair to taxpayers,” said Matthew Conway, press secretary to Tony Clement, the President of the Treasury Board.

The Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development “is doing its utmost to continue to ensure service delivery in a timely fashion with the least amount of disruption to Canadians,” according to a spokesperson. All visa offices remain technically open, and each has a core group of staff deemed “essential,” according to Philippe Couvrette, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Local contractors have also been hired temporarily to process visas, he said.

Mr. Edwards said visa issuance fell by 25% overall in June, but in Beijing and Delhi it is down almost 65%, with a backlog growing at up to 20% per week. He said fewer than half of the 53 visa centres are now meeting CIC’s basic service standard of a two-week turnaround, and half of those are taking a month on average. In Delhi, they had to buy new shelves for the backlog.

One foreign service officer, posted to the Mexico City visa office, said many colleagues are feeling guilty as files pile up, and are tempted to do more to help applicants, “but then we have to realize that it’s not us, we’re not stopping it, it’s really the government that’s stopping it at the moment…. It’s a question of equality, of fighting for our rights.”

“It’s hard to see that people don’t really understand what’s going on, they just feel that we’re not doing our jobs,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity both because of the sensitivity of the strike and because immigrations officers whose names are publicly known are sometimes hounded by applicants. “It’s extremely difficult…. We want to serve our clients the best we can.”

Among the most vulnerable are foreign students.

“It’s all anticipation right now, for us,” said Justin Kerr, international student advisor at Queen’s University. “As an institution, we’re wary of what will manifest when we get closer to the arrival time for students.”

“The prospect of delay is already disturbing students,” said Morton Mendelson, deputy provost (student life and learning) at McGill University, which may also lose some professors to delayed visas. He said this is also “potentially a financial problem” for the school, given that it will be too late to replace them.

The strike “adds an element of uncertainty and risks to crossing borders that really shouldn’t be there,” said Karen McKellin, executive director of the University of British Columbia’s International Student Initiative

“The unfortunate stress levels being imposed on tens of thousands of young students will leave a bad taste of Canada in their mouth,” said Mr. Kurland. “It’s particularly unfortunate because foreign nationals have no right to be here. Can you imagine? You’re in university, and you do not know whether you will have permission to continue your university studies. You risk losing a year, and $25,000 per year that you’re out of the game. So it’s wrong. Young people are going to be the unfortunate victims of a federal labour dispute.”